The Jupiter Theft

“That’s right,” Klein said, amused. “Her first assignment was your friend Berry. She turned in a good report on him—I don’t know why they let him stay on the mission. Then she was told to watch you. You were a tough nut to crack, Jameson. She couldn’t get you to make any Unreliable statements. You were a good little government boy. I told her to keep working on you. I knew you’d slip sometime. And you did. You were a Rad all along, weren’t you?”

“You’re crazy,” Jameson said. He turned to Maggie. “Maggie, how could you do a thing like that?”

She tossed her head. “You wouldn’t know!” she said bitterly. “You’ve had it all, right from the start. Government family, government education, the right friends and the right opinions. How would you like to have a New England code in your passbook, a grandfather who fought in the Secession, and a father who always got you into trouble by talking like a Rad?”

“She turned him in when she was sixteen, Jameson,” Klein said. “That was what got her on our books. We okayed her for the Space Resources Agency training program after that. She’s worked for us ever since.”

“That apartment!” Jameson said. “And the ski weekends at the MacDonald, and the concert tickets, and the collection of antique plastic bottles! No wonder you could afford them!”

The gun never wavered, but her eyes begged him. “You don’t understand! You were born Government! I had to fight for it! It was get into a government program or be a dirty Privie all my life!”

Almost, Jameson was moved. But then he remembered Ruiz’s body tumbling down out of sight, and Boyle, crippled.

“You’re right, Maggie,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

Maggie’s face had become ugly. “I’ll tell you something!” she spat. “You’re a bore and a fool, and you’re lousy in bed, and I’m glad I’ll never have to listen to that stupid Giles Farnaby music again!”

“Maggie,” Jameson said steadily. “They left you behind. They wrote you off. Don’t you realize that? Give me the gun.”

Klein stooped and picked up the Cygnan prod. “Good-bye, Jameson,” he said. There was a dreadful searing pain, and then Jameson, blind, deaf, and paralyzed, was falling into an endless abyss.

There was a red darkness with bright sparks of pain drifting through it. There was a hollow silence with the sound of distant surf booming behind it, and over that, the sound of a woman sobbing.

He stirred, and hurts stabbed all through a body that was monstrously stiff and swollen and raw-edged. Presently he became aware that the sound of surf was within his skull, and the woman sobbing was outside it.

His eyes flicked open. He was sprawled, half sitting and half reclining, against the base of the metal slope. Through blurred vision he saw dim figures busily moving about on the floor of a metal plain that bulged with odd protuberances as big as glacial boulders.

The sobbing came from Maybury, a dozen yards to his left. She was huddled over the body of Dr. Ruiz, cradling his broken head. “Dr. Ruiz, Dr. Ruiz,” she whimpered. She gulped air. “Her—Hernando…”

Chia was standing a little beyond, looking down at Maybury impatiently. Her smooth, exquisite face was smudged, dark hair straggling around it. She was wearing a quilted blue spacesuit and had one of the cylindrical Chinese helmets tucked under her arm. In her ungloved hand she held a hand-laser.

“Get her into a suit,” Chia said.

Numbly Maybury allowed herself to be led away and stuffed into a spacesuit. Jameson’s vision was clearing. He could see that almost everybody was suited up.

He tried to move, and discovered that he was tied up, wrists and ankles. He wriggled a bit. It hurt a lot, but nothing seemed to be broken.

Gifford came limping over, bent like an old man. “Awake now, you son of a bitch?” he said admiringly. “I’ll bet you have a sore backside. You slid down it like a playground slide and never bounced your head once. That’s more than I can say for a couple of the poor bastards you shoved over the edge. Five dead, all together. Chia wants to burn you, slow. She and Klein are still arguing about it.”

“Why am I still alive?” Jameson said.

“You can thank Maggie. She told Klein there wasn’t any reason to kill you now that it’s over. Said it wouldn’t look good on the report. Ruiz and Boyle—that’s another story. They were shot while attempting to interfere with an arbee officer in the performance of his duty.” He grinned. “Anyway, chum, there are too many witnesses.”

He limped away to join the crowd of spacesuited figures clustered around the air lock. Was one of those bulky blue dolls Maggie? She’d have had a time squeezing into Mei-mei’s suit, even with all the slack that a Chinese spacesuit provided. The Chinese, egalitarians all, didn’t believe in custom fitting, but there were limits.